CCS paper completed, now nuclear!
Yesterday I finally completed the first draft of the CCS paper. As I anticipated in the last relevant post, I will likely finalize the article only after the end of the project: for the moment, this draft version is more than sufficient for Deliverable 2.1 and I have to focus on completing the modeling activity within January 15.
The next step is the final task within WP2, focused on nuclear. It is known that this technology still represents a key player in the electricity generation portfolio, contributing with a 11% share worldwide and 27% in the European Union. However, actual prospects for this technology are awkward especially in the EU. On the one hand, many countries have revised their development plans after the incident at the Fukushima power plant in 2011. On the other hand, reactors have been ageing and a considerable number are approaching the end of their operational lifetime, so huge investments would be needed just to maintain the same generation level.
In this perspective, this task aims at exploring the real prospects of nuclear – at a global level, but mostly in the EU – also trying to understand the economic and policy implications of neglecting this technology as a tool to address climate change. In the next weeks, I will carry out an extensive literature review to understand in detail the state of the art, and then I will conceive a set of scenarios to explore interesting and relevant mitigation pathways useful to address this issue.